Blender is perhaps open source's biggest poster child for years now. And in every year or two, Blender foundation showcases the product's 3D graphics capabilities by releasing animated movies created exclusively using Blender software. They are called "open movies" and you're free to download and reuse the movies the way you want, standing true to its open source credentials. Now its time for the fifth one codenamed "Gooseberry", and unlike its predecessors, the project's goal would be to produce a feature length animated film.

project gooseberry trailer
Valve's mighty Portal video game is coming to Android. This is huge. In a recent briefing, NVIDIA has announced the imminent arrival of Portal for Android through NVIDIA SHIELD gaming console. The announcement about its new partnership with Valve was done by NVIDIA at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) currently being held at Silicon Valley.

portal for android via NVIDIA SHIELD
Locally Integrated Menus were a hugely anticipated feature since the introduction of universal menu in earlier Unity. 'Click to Minimize' is a similar functionality asked by many in the community. Well, it has been delivered. The latest iteration of Compiz Config Settings Manager (CCSM) has the Click to Minimize feature in the Launcher settings as an experimental functionality. And it will probably make it as a default Unity Launcher behaviour prior to the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS codenamed "Trusty Tahr".

ubuntu 14.04 features
"After much deliberation, we've decided that one of the next steps for us is to support Linux." GOG.com becomes the latest firm to appreciate the long-term potential of Linux on computers. The arrival of Steam on Linux has to be the most important factor behind a sea change in attitude of major game vendors towards Linux. Testing of games are on and it seems like Ubuntu and Linux Mint will be the ones to get official support initially.

gog.com support for linux games
More fun stuff added to Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr". This time, the lockscreen received a much needed update. To me, the most important aspect about this change is the fact that, lockscreen actually got faster and better-looking at the same time. On the other hand, Ubuntu's new borderless theme for window decorators looks absolutely gorgeous!

ubuntu 14.04 LTS lock screen
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is marching ahead and will be released as previously planned, on April 17, 2014. Many new features has been added including the much-loved Locally Integrated Menus (LIMs). Community contributed wallpapers was the next in line. From a large cache of about 405 submissions, 11 carefully sorted wallpapers has made it to the final list.

community wallpapers for ubuntu 14.04
The google-translate-cli is a very simple 100-line AWK program that lets you use Google Translate without a web browser, and right from your Terminal. And it is as simple as it sounds. All you need is the GNU implementation of AWK programming language called Gawk and Git. Here's how you setup Google Translate for your Terminal in Ubuntu. 

google translate terminal ubuntu 14.04
Time to say good-bye to global menus already? Seems like it. Canonical is planning to ditch its controversial and much talked about global menus for the more conventional Local menus setup, starting with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr". This is a huge departure, considering the fact that global menus were introduced just about two years ago. 

local menus ubuntu 14.04